In some jurisdictions of the country anti-littering laws require vendors of beverages in certain kinds of containers, such as aluminum cans, to collect a deposit for each such container. The deposit is refundable upon the return of the container to the vendor. The vendor thus may accumulate a large number of completely or partially empty containers which are sold to a reclaimer who crushes and bales or otherwise conditions the containers for delivery to a remelt installation for reclamation.
At each stage of the procedure prior to baling it in necessary to provide some manner of ascertaining the number of empty containers. Presently, two systems are predominant. In one the containers are weighed. This is not a particularly reliable system, however, for several reasons. First, not all of the containers are empty as a consequence of which the weight of particular batch of containers may be far from accurate. Second, foreign matter frequently may be adhered to or mingled with the containers. In this case the weight of a batch of containers again may be quite inaccurate.
The second predominant system in use today involves the manual counting of containers. This system also is undesirable because it is time consuming and requires the services of multiple persons, thus adding to the cost of disposing of the empty containers. Further, audits have shown that manual counting and recording of containers is not particularly accurate.
Apparatus constructed in accordance with the invention has been designed to overcome the problems associated with the container counting systems referred to above and, at the same time, result in a highly accurate count of containers using only a minimum number of personnel.